With the aim of creating an international network of 1000 women trained in various scientific fields, who can lead and influence decision-making that affects the planet, the Homeward Bound program was launched in Australia in 2016. Until 2026, this initiative, which will allow the role of women scientists to be valued and made visible, will select between 70 and 90 women each year to whom it will offer a leadership training program in which they will work on various skills related to team management, international relations or communication, in addition to the opportunity to participate in a joint trip, which in this edition will be to Antarctica.
Alba Aguión, a professor and researcher at Future Oceans Lab at the Marine Research Center of the University of Vigo, has just become the first Galician scientist to be selected for the fifth edition of the project, to which she submitted her candidacy, and which she considers “a unique opportunity to improve my leadership skills with world experts and to contact other scientists, with the interest of fighting for a more sustainable world free from gender stereotypes,” explains the biologist, who is in the US on a stay. Aguión considers it “a matter of pride” to be the first Galician to participate in this international program, which she will combine with the preparation of her doctoral thesis on the adaptation of artisanal fishing to the impacts of climate change, an issue on which the program also offers extensive training.
11 months of training that will end with a trip to Antarctica
This year’s program will officially start next November and will last for 11 months, during which the participants, including five Spanish scientists, will have individual and group meetings to work on leadership, management and team skills, communication and international relations. “We will also receive training in climate change and gender equality,” explains Alba, who is particularly excited about the trip that the 75 selected for this edition will take to Antarctica at the end of 2020, where they will also have the opportunity to meet each other personally and discover “in situ” pioneering research on climate change.
“Antarctica has areas that have recorded some of the largest temperature increases in the last 50 years on the planet (Antarctic Peninsula). It is a unique opportunity to see first-hand the effects of climate change in a particularly vulnerable and very important place for the planet, since the advance and retreat of the ice on the continent has an influence at a planetary level”, details the researcher. Alba Aguión, who had already participated during her master’s degree in an expedition to the Arctic to study the bacteria and archaea of the glaciers, will now have the opportunity to complete her training by traveling to the other end of the world. “I look forward to bringing new stories to tell students and adults in my visits to schools and museums”, highlights the biologist, who in her role as a science communicator, won the Famelab Spain competition in 2016, the largest international scientific monologue competition, with a piece entitled The Intelligence of the Anthill.
Can girls aspire to careers without women to inspire them?
The CIM-UVigo researcher highlights, in addition to the possibility that this program offers her of establishing relationships with other female scientists, that of establishing future collaborations, both scientific and in outreach projects, that give visibility to the figure of women in science. “Before starting my doctorate in Vigo, I worked in the United Kingdom with a company called Education Through Expeditions, with which I visited schools in which I spoke about my research in the Arctic. The day before my visits, the girls and boys drew the scientist they were going to meet and after visiting more than 50 centers, on very few occasions did they draw a woman. This raises a question: can girls aspire to professional careers without women to inspire them? I think not and that is why it is so important to make the role of women visible, far from the traditional role”, says Aguión.
The biologist from the University of Vigo is doing her doctorate within the project CLOCK (Adaptation Solutions for Climate Change Impacts Fisheries) and PERCEBES (Tools for the transition to spatial management of coastal: the stalked barnacle fishery in SW Europe) and claims to have “a special interest in understanding how climate change will affect the barnacle, which serves as a case study of animals that cannot escape with the rise in temperatures, and on which there is a special importance of adjusting their extraction to the effects that are arrive”, he explains.
In addition to a website about her participation in the project, Alba Aguión has another website dedicated to collecting donations with which to pay the price of her participation in the project, about 33,000 American dollars “of which I am already awarded a 50% scholarship by the program itself. The other half, plus about 3000 dollars for expedition expenses, is the part that I will raise with sponsors and by holding science outreach events and through crowdfunding”, details the scientist.
Source: DUVI
